The Passive Voice

An active sentence like I drank two cups of coffee has the subject first (the person or thing that does the verb), followed by the verb, and finally the object (the person or thing that the action happens to).

So, in this example, the subject is ‘I’, the verb is ‘drank’ and the object is ‘two cups of coffee’.

The Passive Voice

But, we don’t always need to make sentences this way. We might want to put the object first, or perhaps we don’t want to say who did something. This can happen for lots of reasons (see the explanation further down the page). In this case, we can use a passive, which puts the object first:

Two cups of coffee were drunk (we can add ‘by me’ if we want, but it isn’t necessary).